Dead Gods: Eight
Sam looks up from surfing a mythology website of questionable reliability to see a pool of insidious coffee spreading towards his laptop.
“Hey!” He snatches it up, holding it above the spill. The waitress, young and blonde and maybe twenty if that, starts and jerks the coffee pot away.
“Oh! Sorry! I got distracted.” She hastily digs a handful of napkins out of the dispenser on his table and slaps them down on the spill, keeping the coffee from spilling over the edge of the table and into Sam’s lap. “My sister lives in Savannah, and we haven’t heard from her yet, and just sorry. Uh, let me go get a rag.”
She disappears into the kitchen, no explanation for her non-sequitur about her sister, and for the first time, Sam notices the empty tables around him, the still, almost solemn silence of the diner. A handful of customers and staff are crowding around the register, all heads turned towards the television mounted high on the wall in the corner. CNN is on, showing images of ruined houses and wrecked fishing boats and people picking among the debris.
“It’s horrible, you know?” The waitress reappears at his elbow with a dishwater gray rag and begins wiping up the spilled coffee. Her expression is grim, her eyes red and puffy. “I mean, when I was a kid, we were living in Mobile when Katrina hit, and that was bad, and I guess all those earthquakes and storms a couple of years back were awful, too, but I don’t know. Can you imagine? Standing with both feet on the ground and then just suddenly being sucked out to sea?”
Sam is feeling a little like that in a metaphorical sense, but he gets that whatever natural disaster was being televised on CNN and upsetting his waitress was big, big enough to have caught the focused attention of everyone in the diner.
“What happened?”
The waitress paused in her fruitless attempt to mop up the mess and gave him an incredulous look.
“You haven’t heard yet?” Her eyes flicker to the laptop as if he should have already known. “The tsunami?”
“The tsunami?” Sam realizes how dumb he sounds, echoing her words, and the look on her face confirms it. “Where?”
“Georgia and Florida, mostly. It wiped out the coast from Hilton Head down to Daytona. They’re saying the body count is already in the thousands. Entire towns don’t even exist anymore. They say the damage is probably going to be worse than the earthquakes in Boston and Portland back in 2010 combined.”
“Huh.” They hadn’t seen that level of destruction since Lucifer was walking free. “When did it happen?”
“About eleven last night, not long after I got off of the phone with my sister.” The waitress’s breath hitches, and she drops her eyes. For the first time, Sam notices that her nametag reads Sarah, like some horrible cosmic joke. “Anyway, sorry about the coffee. I’ll bring you a fresh cup. Your food should be about ready now, too.”
She hustles away, leaving Sam with a feeling of deep unease. The table is passably dry, and Sam pulls a few napkins from the dispenser and wipes up any remaining coffee before he is willing to set the laptop on the table again. He checks his favorite online news sources for more information, and sure enough, a tsunami had hit the coastal regions of Georgia and north Florida at about eleven the night before, following a 8.1 earthquake off the coast. Geologists are baffled because there weren’t any early warning signs, and the Atlantic isn’t usually a hotbed of seismic activity. Additionally, the magnitude of the destruction doesn’t fit the magnitude of the earthquake; apparently an 8.1 would have done considerable damage, but it wouldn’t have done as much damage as this one had. The deaths are already numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and the body count is climbing exponentially. The property damage can’t even begin to be estimated, and the president has already declared a state of emergency.
Sam is scrolling through some of the pictures of apocalyptic destruction when Sarah reappears with his breakfast and another cup of coffee, then joins the group watching CNN at the front of the room. He has the unsettling sense that the tsunami is important somehow - no early warning on the seismographs could indicate that something supernatural is going on. That was how it had been in those last months before he jumped into the Pit; the earthquakes, the tsunami chain, the volcanic eruptions on the Pacific Rim - they hadn’t given any early warnings, either.
Sam eats quickly, pays his bill at the register up front, and tells Sarah he hopes she hears from her sister soon. A blast of frigid air meets him on his way out; Michigan hasn’t quite caught on that it is spring, yet. The morning sky sits gray and heavy above him as he unlocks the car, shivering in the sharp wind, the oranges and reds of the rising sun glowing through the breaks in the clouds.
As he waits for the car to warm up, he tries to figure out why the tsunami strikes him as important. There is no good reason to think it has anything to do with what is happening to Ben, but he can’t shake the feeling that the two are connected. It is absurd at best, but he doesn’t believe in coincidences. Ben’s visions and the way the crows had melded into a massive cyclone of feathers on that back road in Georgia, and now a tsunami along the same stretch of I-95 they were on not quite two days ago.
“Do not move.”
The sensation of another being popping into existence next to him is abrupt, no flutter of angel’s wings as warning nor the smell of sulfur, just the almost pleasant scent of trees and wet leaves and a dark person shape in the corner of his eye. Sam has some reflexive thoughts of going for the demon killing knife in his coat pocket, but the edge of a sharp blade pressed against his throat circumvents any follow through. “I will not harm you.”
“Well, the knife at my throat says otherwise.” His voice is calm, solid. He isn’t scared, not really, but he is wary, and his fingers flex with the desire to reach into his coat pocket anyway.
Slight pressure on his skin forces him to turn his head, to face his visitor.
Her femme fatale assassin look is incongruous in the polyester and plastic interior of the rented Toyota, but she is beautiful in the way of so many of the creatures they meet are, fantastically perfect at a distance but so very alien when you really look at them. She studies him shrewdly, her pornographically red lips pressed together in deep thought. He feels an odd tug of attraction towards her, but it isn’t desire precisely, more like a visceral compulsion to please her.
Sam doesn’t particularly care for it; it reminds him too much of his hunger for demon blood.
“Artemis,” he says.
“Sam Winchester.” She draws the blade back a fraction of an inch. “I need your knowledge of Judeo-Christian magic.”
That is certainly not what he was expecting to hear. “What?”
“There are questions I can’t answer on my own. I need you to come with me.” Her blade does not stray from his throat, but her free hand reaches over the barrier of the armrest to touch the back of his wrist -
He is suddenly standing on the front walk of a huge brick house with white shutters and dark windows. Nearly identical houses line the street in either direction; the only differences are the type of SUV in the driveway and minor variations in the neatly manicured lawns. It could be any suburban middle class neighborhood anywhere in the country; up and down the street he can see joggers and dog walkers and parents herding their kids into cars to take them to school, all bundled up against the early spring chill.
“Where are we?” he asks Artemis, standing beside him and even more out of place in her Bond girl get up in this bustling suburban neighborhood than she had been in the car. Her blade is nowhere to be seen.
“Muncie, Indiana.” She starts up the front walk. “Come.”
Sam hesitates, all of his training telling him that entering an apparently empty house with a pagan goddess after being teleported hundreds of miles in a split second is a bad idea. But his instincts are telling him to follow, because she’s brought him to Muncie, which is, if he remembers correctly, only about an hour from both Indianapolis and Cicero. Kind of a coincidence, that.
There isn’t really a choice here, all things considered.
Sam follows.
It’s the typical mass produced middle class suburban house: laminate counters, huge rooms with high ceilings, crown molding, and recessed lighting. The tiled foyer opens up into a carpeted living room on the right and a stairway leading to the second floor to the left. Heavy blackout curtains cover the windows. The house has been closed up for a very long time; the musty scent of dust and damp carpeting hangs in the air, stale and heavy.
Also, every surface is covered with runes and sigils.
It’s an impressive art project; the walls, the floors, even the ceiling are covered with the symbols of a dozen different religions. He recognizes many at sight, but there are others he doesn’t recognize at all. He sees some Enochian, some Japanese and Norse, but most are Mediterranean, pagan protections against discovery, the evil eye, unwelcome onlookers, and nosey neighbors.
“Someone didn’t want this house to be found,” Sam says, eyeing a line of what he thinks might be Hittite protection glyphs climbing up the stairwell wall. “How did you find it?”
“The same way you find these things. I went hunting. This way.”
Artemis leads him further into the house. Sam trails her through the living room and into a dining room with a gaudy chandelier thick with spider webs. Their footsteps echo back at them; the house is bare of furniture, and the sound ricochets off every surface. In the kitchen, the steady plunk of a dripping faucet is a constant tattoo, and there are dark, rusty stains splattered across the cabinets.
Artemis flicks her wrist at a door in the short hallway off the kitchen, and it opens to her will, revealing a flight of wooden stairs that disappear into a dark basement. Sam follows her down uneasily. Something powerful is down there; he can feel it washing against his skin, like water sloshing against the side of a boat.
At the foot of the stairs, Sam stops and stares.
The most elaborate devil’s trap he has ever seen is drawn out on the basement floor, and inside, a demon in its black smoke form throwing itself repeatedly against the barrier, quick and violent like a swarm of angry bees. He doesn’t know if the power he feels is from the demon or the trap, but he suspects the trap. Generally speaking, the more intricate the design, the more likely it’s meant for long term demon enslavement rather than mere entrapment, and that requires a hell of a lot more power.
“I take it this is the Judeo-Christian magic you were talking about?”
“Yes.” Artemis stands at the edge of the trap, frowning at the demon. “What is it? It hums with power.”
“It’s a devil’s trap.” Sam walks the circumference of it, marveling at the intricate detailing, the pentagram in the middle, the six concentric circles around it, two filled with swooping, unrecognizable sigils, the rest filled with writing that is powerfully familiar. Someone with a lot of patience and a steady hand drew this trap. “For trapping demons.”
Artemis huffs impatiently, a strangely human sound. “Obviously it’s for trapping demons. I mean, what is it for? Even I recognize that this is not...” In frustration she gestures at the demon at the center of the trap. “...normal.”
“No. It isn’t. Demons don’t spend a lot of time on this plane without possessing a host.” Sam stops, stuffs his hands in his pockets, takes a minute to consider the problem at hand. “Do you recognize the writing?”
She shakes her head. “It isn’t a language used by any of my worshippers.”
“Right.” Sam sighs. Dean will have to pull research duty on this one. He snaps off several pictures of the trap with his cell phone, gets some close ups of the writing and the sigils, and emails them to Dean.
Sam drops the phone back into his pocket and starts back up the stairs. “Let’s see what else is here.”
“There’s nothing of interest.” Sam hears her tread on the stairs behind him, feels the tug of her power at his back as she follows him up. “I’ve checked all the rooms already.”
“Well, I’m going to check them again.”
Artemis says nothing else, just leans in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed and hips canted, watching with an air of impatience as Sam goes through all of the cabinets. She hovers with sharp eyes as he investigates the garage and hall closets and the remaining rooms downstairs, finds only a dead roach in the half-bath under the stairs and a can of devilled ham in a kitchen cabinet. Then she is right behind him on the stairs to the second floor, the air of the stairwell heavy with her power.
Mostly, he ignores her; he and Dean don’t have a great track record with gods, but Artemis isn’t hostile, and she had been reasonable - for a god, anyway - when they had encountered her last time. He isn’t pleased that he has been press ganged into her service, but between the demon trap downstairs, demon included, and his list of two dozen murder victims, a handful of them killed not more than an hour away, her involvement can’t be just a coincidence.
Not to mention the fact that three years ago, he and Dean had been captured by a group of gods not far from Muncie with the intention of blackmailing the angels into stopping the Apocalypse. It hadn’t turned out too well for them, but he can’t ignore that coincidence, either.
It’s frustrating as hell not knowing how this all fits together.
The two bedrooms upstairs are bare of anything but sigils and dust, but in the master bedroom, he hits the jackpot: a bare mattress splotched with black stains, sigils on the walls, and a heap of books scattered on the floor.
Just as Ben had said.
Sam crouches next to the books and starts stacking them, looking for the green book with the duct tape binding. There are a couple of books he had only seen in Bobby’s collection, several in languages he doesn’t recognize, and a copy of one Chuck’s Supernatural books, which, just, come on. He finally sees the frayed duct tape binding under a huge grimoire that probably should be burned post-haste and a dog eared copy of the King James’s Bible.
Sam tugs it out and stands. The book is written in what he thinks might be Turkish, which he can’t read, but the illustrations seem to indicate it’s an academic treatise on demonology. He flips through the musty pages, studying the various sigils, devil’s traps, and ritual maps and wishing for the slightest inkling of what the captions say.
Artemis drifts closer. “What have you found?”
“I don’t know. I recognize this language, but can’t read it.” He presents the book to her. “Can you?”
Artemis gives him a look that reminds him of the way the angels, Castiel included, used to look at him, like he is something she needs to scrape off her shoe. “I am not a scribe.”
“Maybe not, but you’re the one who brought me to help you. Can you read it or not?”
She lets out another of those impatient huffs and snatches the book from his hand. She glares at the page for a moment, but her shoulders loosen fractionally when she realizes what she’s looking at. “This is the symbol downstairs.”
“Yeah. Can you read it?”
“Yes.” She studies the page a moment. “It is a symbol used by the ancient Babylonians to control the destination of a corrupted soul. It allows the sorcerer not only to trap the demon but to force it to do his bidding. If the demon is exorcised while outside the confines of the symbol, it will return to the trap rather than the underworld.” She stops, frowns, her eyes distant as she makes some kind of connection Sam is not privy to. “So that’s how he did it.”
“How who did what?”
Artemis looks up sharply, glances sidelong at the books. “Thank you, Sam,” she says, and reaches for him.
“No, wait!” Sam says, but the words are spoken from the driver’s seat of the rental car, and Artemis is once again a study in the surreal against the gray interior. The car is still idling, the interior warmed now, and beyond the windshield, the day is a little brighter. The book is nowhere to be seen.
“What the hell?” Sam snaps, irritated. “I wasn’t done.”
“Maybe not, but I have all I need to know.”
“All you need to-“ Sam has to stop, suck in a deep breath, and tell himself not make the goddess sitting in the passenger seat of his rented Toyota as furious as he is. He’s seen her power before, just a few weeks ago, in fact, and he doesn’t have any back up at the moment. “Look. We’re hunting the same thing and you know it. I get that demon is being used to kill a very specific group of people, but who’s pulling the strings?”
Artemis tilts to the side, the slight curl of her lips hinting at fond amusement. “Are you aware that if you and your brother were to worship me with even the smallest of libations and prayers, I could expedite your hunts one thousand fold? With your training and innate abilities, there would be no creature able to elude your grasp.”
Sam stares at her, stunned. She’s propositioning him. Now, when he’s trying to figure out what kind of monster is hunting Ben and kids - people - like Ben, and she’s hitting him up for worship like a junky trying to score a fix. Which, given, is better than trying to kill him, but it doesn’t piss him off any less.
“Yeah? And what would we get if we offered a prayer to Acestor?”
The amusement falls off her face, her jaw tightens. She suddenly seems muted, smaller, more human. Even the vividness of her red lipstick seems to have faded.
“Nothing.” Her voice is unnaturally steady, a steel door slammed shut over intense pain. “He’s dead.”
Surprise cuts through Sam’s anger. Not surprise that there’s another dead god - he and Dean had seen plenty dead gods in their time, and in several cases, had made them that way - but surprise that he so easily recognizes her grief. He remembers the weight of it, its inescapable, piercing presence, first when Dean went to Hell, the later, when he was dragged into Purgatory in the wake of Dick Roman’s death.
Sam sighs. He’s going about this the wrong way. All witnesses want to talk, even ancient goddesses of the hunt, but he’s not going to get anything out of her if he’s functioning on a razor thin edge of anger.
Also, he can’t help but to sympathize with her a little bit.
“I’m sorry,” he says, quiet and gentle.
Artemis looks away, at some distant point beyond the windshield. “As am I.”
Sam gives her a minute, just long enough for her grief to settle, but not long enough for her to get her defenses back up. “Look, I can help. You know I can help. Just tell me what killed those people.”
She sighs, shakes her head. “Sam, you can’t fight what killed those people. I’m not even sure I can fight what killed those people. You should return to your brother and protect the boy.”
Sam’s blood runs cold. “You know about Ben?”
Now she’s turning a look of sympathy on him, pity even. “He’s the most powerful child we have had in three millennia. Of course I know about Ben. We all know about Ben.”
“We, Artemis? Who is we?”
“Be silent, Sam.” Artemis’s voice is mild, an echo of Sam’s earlier sympathy, but the order behind it cuts through Sam, into that sliver of his soul that she can command as the goddess of the hunt. His throat closes on his words, his mouth snaps shut.
Sam glares at her, mute and properly furious.
She leans into his space; her lips are shiny red, her presence heavy, and the compulsion to please her is tugging at him again.
“I don’t have time to answer your questions right now. He has already devoured twenty-four divine children, and he took Poseidon last night. I can’t even begin to guess how strong he is, but I do know that even if you found him, there would be nothing you could do except die horribly. So stop hunting him and go home. You and your brother are my only allies in this. Many of my siblings won’t speak to me after what I did to our father, and those who will don’t believe me, so I need you both to concentrate on protecting Ben.”
The knife reappears in her hand and is pressed into the soft spot under his chin. “And let me make myself clear on this. This is not your hunt, it is mine. You will go to wherever you have hidden Ben and protect him with your life.”
The blade presses further into his flesh, biting but not cutting. “When we last met, you told your brother that I was your goddess. I am aware that you were being rhetorical, but disobey me, Samuel Winchester, and you will find how very much your goddess I really am.”
And with that she’s gone, the pleasant scent of pine and fresh loam the only evidence that she was ever there.
Dean is checking the locks again.
“I’m pretty sure the house is locked up, Dean.” Ben plops down on the guest room bed and watches him fiddle with the latch on the window. Dean’s been doing this for a while now, going from room to room, rattling door knobs and wrestling with windows. Ben is getting a little tired of it, should probably go off and do something on his own since Dean is obviously not interested in him. But he can’t help following him around like a kicked puppy, hoping for some affection.
Ben kind of hates himself for it.
“Why don’t we go watch a movie or something?” Strike kind of. He totally hates himself. “I got the Batman trilogy for Christmas.”
Dean presses the heels of his hands up under the frame and tries to force the pane up. His muscles are straining hard, but the window doesn’t budge. “Not now, Ben.”
Ben huffs. “Why not? We’ve been through the house, what, four times now? I’m pretty sure nothing can get in.”
With his own huff of frustration, Dean drops his arms and backs away from the window. Ben can’t see his face, but his shoulders are tense, his fists clenched.
“I’m not trying to prevent anything from coming in,” he says absently, his mind clearly on other things. “I’m trying to get out.”
Ben feels like he’s been kicked in the chest. “Yeah, no. I get it.”
He heaves himself up off the bed, goes towards the door. His eyes are burning, his vision going all swimmy. He doesn’t need a dad, never has, and why he keeps hanging around Dean, hoping....
Behind him, Dean sighs. “Ben, wait.”
Ben turns, and Dean is holding out a bottle of Ibuprofen.
“Here, kiddo, take these.”
Ben holds out his hand and watches, confused, as Dean shakes a couple of pills into palm. He’s somehow sitting on the bed in Dean’s room, dressed in a t-shirt and Dean’s track pants, shivering. He’s not sure where the window went.
“I thought you were trying to get out.”
Dean recaps the ibuprofen and sets the bottle on the night stand, casting a look of confusion Ben’s way. “Get out of where?”
“The house.”
Dean presses a glass of water into Ben’s free hand. “What house?”
“The one in Cicero.” Ben takes the glass; it’s cold and damp on his skin. “The guest room window wouldn’t open.”
Dean stares at him hard. “Ben you were dreaming. Take those.”
Ben looks down at his hands, at the pair of orange NSAIDs just sitting on his palm, at the glass of water cold and slippery in his hand, and remembers what he’s supposed to be doing.
“Right,” he mutters, and dutifully tips the pills into his mouth.
They are dully sweet, but the water is sweeter, cool and crisp. He downs it all in one go. The pills aren’t going to do much for him; his temperature is at one-oh-seven and climbing, and his body is way past the stage where the ibuprofen can do anything for him. But the water helps a lot; dehydration is setting in, his fever devouring the moisture in his body, and he can almost literally feel the water molecules being absorbed into his blood stream.
Dean is watching him with a critical eye. “Any future dreams?”
Ben shakes his head. “No. I haven’t had one of those since you fixed them.”
“Since I fixed them?” Dean says it weird, all slow and cautious. The phantom wound on his side is bleeding all over the place, but that’s pretty much standard now, and Ben can’t seem to read what’s bothering him in his wounds.
“What?” he asks.
Dean starts to say something, a reply clearly posed on his lips, but the ring of his phone distracts him from answering. He fishes it out of his back pocket, glances at the screen.
“It’s Sam. I’m going to talk to him. Why don’t you get up, and I’ll make us some breakfast?”
Ben nods. “Okay.”
Dean answers the phone, cutting off the guitar-riff ringtone as he turns away, heads for the door.
“Hey,” Dean says, the sound of his voice dwindling as he moves away from the room.
Ben looks at the open door, then the bed, then the open door again. The bed wins, and Ben lies back down, pulls the blanket up to his chin. He’ll just close his eyes for just a few more minutes, no need to rush...
“Come here,” Dean says from the front door. He’s flipping the dead bolt back and forth, tugging frantically at the knob, trying to get it to open.
“Why? There’s nothing I can do to help you.” Ben flops back on the couch and sighs loudly and dramatically, making sure Dean knows how displeased he is. He wipes away the sweat dribbling down his forehead with the back of his arm. It’s really hot for some reason. “We’re obviously trapped in here together.”
“Ben, stop answering it,” Dean says, just before he steps back and kicks the door; the door shudders in the frame, but doesn’t seem any more inclined to open than it was before.
“Answering what?”
“Come back here,” a voice says, and this time Ben realizes it isn’t Dean speaking, but someone else, someone who’s close by. Maybe in the kitchen?
“That.” Dean goes to the front window and yanks the curtains open. It’s dark outside, so dark that Ben can’t see the porch or the lawn or the street. Neither his nor Dean’s reflection are visible in the glass.
Ben wipes away another dribble of sweat.
“Please,” the voice says again, whiney and desperate. It sounds like it’s coming from the dining room. “You’re so close, just come here and let me out.”
Ben frowns, and sits up. “Who is it?
“I promise to be good,” the voice says in the same pleading tone Lucy uses when she wants him to put in one of her Disney movies when he’s trying to watch golf. “Just let me out.”
“No one and nothing,” Dean says, tracing the seam of the window with his fingertips. “Just ignore it, and it will stop.”
Ben gets up and goes to the doorway, ignoring Dean. The dining room is dark and still, the table and chairs like spindly legged aliens in the darkness.
“Mom?” he calls hopefully.
He wipes a droplet of sweat tricking under his ear on his shoulder and reaches for the light switch.
A bright light suddenly shines in his eyes.
Ben squints in the brightness, wincing at the light, moving and jumping and making sounds, but then the sounds resolve into voices and the moving lights become people. The TV on top of Dean’s dresser is on the news, blaring flickering light directly into his eyes. Ben blinks, letting his eyes adjust, his brain finally sorting the chattering newscasters and the images of palm trees and destroyed houses into something he can understand.
Apparently, there was a tsunami in Florida and Georgia.
Ben watches for a while, vaguely curious, the three blankets Dean had added to the bed a comfortable weight forming a cocoon of warmth around him. It’s nice, cozy. But when the anchor starts going on about a fire in Chicago, Ben loses interest, rolls onto his side to find Dean is propped up against the headboard, legs stretched out in front of him. A big, moldy book with yellowish pages lies open on his lap. He is wiggling his toes slowly, his toes undulating in his mismatched socks, and he seems completely absorbed in what he’s reading.
Ben’s glad he’s finally stopped trying to get out.
“About time you woke up.” Dean looks over at Ben. “How are you feeling?”
“Sleepy.”
“Uh-huh, I noticed.” Dean reaches for Ben, the book sliding sideways off Dean’s lap into the gap between them.
Ben automatically yanks his hand up, blocking Dean’s. His fever is at one-oh-nine now, and that’s going to freak Dean out. He’s at the point where he should be at a hospital, should probably be having convulsions and hallucinating, but there’s just this overwhelming exhaustion and sluggishness, this desire to close his eyes and never wake up. There’s something unnatural about that, but he doesn’t have the energy to care.
Dean looks irritated, but he backs down. He reaches for the book instead, and Ben sees that it isn’t in English.
“Is that Latin? I didn’t know you could read Latin.” Ben is impressed. Like really, really impressed. Dean had always been all about Ben doing all his homework and keeping his grades up in school, but it always seemed like Dean didn’t care for it much himself. Ben knew he had only gotten a GED, and that’s something you get when you don’t finish high school, so he didn’t think Dean was all that into nerdy stuff. Not that he had never thought Dean was dumb, the opposite, actually, but Latin? Dean was way smarter than Ben thought.
“I can get by.” Dean picks up the book, snaps it closed, and sets it on the table next to the bed. “Sam is much better at it.”
“What are you reading about?”
Dean shrugs offhandedly. “Just some stuff that Sam asked me to look up. Nothing you need to worry about. Think you can you sit up for me?”
Ben considers that a moment. His body feels heavy, and he isn’t ready to leave the cocoon of warmth, but yeah, he probably can. He struggles to pull his body upright and eventually gets himself propped up against the headboard.
“Can you stay awake long enough for me to go get you some water and something to eat? You’re going to get dehydrated if you don’t have something.”
Ben ponders that a moment. “Do you have any peanut butter?”
Dean smirks. “You and Sam. Yeah, we’ve got peanut butter. It’s that natural hippy crap, but I think it’s the same kind your mom always buys. Peanut butter toast, right?”
Ben nods. He doesn’t want it, eating seems less interesting today than it did last night, but Dean is obviously relieved that he gets to feed him, and peanut butter toast is the least offensive thing he can think of.
Dean gets up off the bed and jams his feet back into his boots. “Stay awake, Ben, okay? You need to eat something and drink some water before you go back to sleep.”
“Okay,” he says, and Dean casts a distrustful look over his shoulder as he disappears into the hallway.
Ben pulls the blankets up to his neck, trying to reestablish his cocoon of warmth, and huddles against the headboard. The news anchor is talking about the state of the economy since last year’s stock market crash caused by Dick Roman’s disappearance, and then there are a bunch of old white guys in suits, arguing about whether the market is recovering or not.
Ben sighs, bored. He folds his arms on the kitchen counter and puts his head down instead. It feels like it weighs about a hundred pounds, and it’s exhausting keeping it upright.
“I don’t think that is going to work,” Ben tells Dean, his voice muffled against his arm.
Dean’s got the putter he and Mom got him for his birthday raised up over his shoulder like a baseball bat, aiming it at the window in the kitchen door. He has kicked and hit and rattled every window and door in the house with no result. Ben has no idea why he thinks this will work.
“There has to be a way out.” Dean swings the putter around slowly towards the glass, checking his aim. “It’s dangerous for me to stay.”
“God, you’re such a dick,” Ben says. “The least you could do is quit lying to me.”
“I’m not - “ Dean swings the putter, this time with the full force of his strength, and it bounces of the pane harmlessly, the glass rattling but not breaking, “-lying to you.”
Dean steps back and drops the putter with a clatter. He mutters something that sounds nothing like English, though Ben can tell from the tone that he’s swearing, and pretty filthily at that. Ben has half a mind to tell him to throw some money in the swear jar like Mom would, but he’s just called Dean a dick without having to pay out himself, so he just settles for saying told you so.
“Told you so.” Ben lifts his hundred pound head and wipes at the sweat tricking from his hairline into his eyes. It’s really hot in here, now, and he’s completely drenched in sweat, his t-shirt sticking unpleasantly to his back.
“Ben?” Dean says, sounding concerned.
He’s just so hot. Ben puts his head back down and closes his eyes.
“I’m sorry this happened to you.” Dean says again, gentle, and for the first time since he got here, totally focused on him. “I will fix it somehow. I promise.” Ben feels his hand on his forehead - he didn’t see his hand coming, or he would have blocked it - but it feels nice, pleasantly cool against his hot skin. He should pull away on principle, but he’s just too tired to bother.
“He’s burning up. I haven’t been able to get any fluids in him either. He won’t stay awake long enough.” There’s a warm weight on the bed, the mattress dipping down a little, and Ben figures that must be Dean. “Well, if I had an IV, I’d give it to him, Sam.”
It’s so, so hard to open his eyes, but Ben manages. Dean’s on the phone, his hand resting lightly on Ben’s forehead. His gaze is focused somewhere in the distance, his expressions tense with worry.
“I don’t know about that. The clinic was one thing, but a hospital with a fever this high? They’d admit him, and who knows how deep they would dig into who he is. It would be different if there weren’t missing posters all over the internet.”
Ben wonders if he should let Dean know that going to the hospital won’t be any more effective than the ibuprofen were. His fever is at one-ten, and the hospital might start asking questions about why Ben’s not brain damaged yet. It’s just a bad idea all around.
“Yeah. Okay. I’ll try that.”
Ben wonders what Dean’s going to try, and he finds out a second later when the bathroom door hits the wall with a resounding crack as Dean slams it open. Dean has a grip on his arm with one hand, dragging Ben behind him, and with the other, he’s turning on the shower.
“What the hell are you doing?” Ben asks, struggling fruitlessly against the manhandling.
“Saving your life,” Dean says and shoves him under the spray.
Ben yelps as soon as the water hits his skin. It’s icy cold, drenching his hair and clothes instantly. He blinks against the water running into his eyes and tries to shove his way past the large, person shaped blob that must be Dean.
“No.” Dean pushes him back under, drenching him all over again. His whole body is wracked with shivers, and his teeth are clacking loudly against one another. “I didn’t take that prophecy just to let you die.”
“M’not dying,” Ben pushes through his chattering teeth.
“You are, and fairly soon if you don’t get this fever under control. Now take control of your body and push the fever down.”
“I don’t even know what that means!” Ben splutters.
Dean points at the shower wall. “There, see? There’s your thermostat. Set it to 98.6.”
And sure enough, the thermostat is mounted on the tiles, just under the towel rack. Ben hits the down arrow button, and the thermostat beeps its way down to the right temperature.
Light again in his eyes, and cold, searing, horrible cold everywhere, lapping at his skin.
Ben lunges upwards, tries to get away.
“Hey, no, Ben.” Dean grabs him, pushes him back into the numbing cold. “We need to get your temperature down.”
He’s freezing, his body enveloped in icy water, actual ice bumping against him every time he moves. He tries to get up, to get out of the freezing cold ice water again, but Dean has a better grip on him, keeping him in the tub with both hands on his shoulders. He’s half soaked himself, kneeling over the tub like he is.
“Shh, no, Ben, it’s okay.”
“You’re trying to kill me,” Ben says with a pathetic whine. His body is shivering hard, and the light hurts his eyes, and it’s just so cold.
“Am not. I’m trying to get your fever down.”
A hard, convulsing shiver wracks his body, and he might hate Dean more than ever before, but his temperature is ticking down, slowly but surely. He is down to one-oh-seven; one-oh-six should be along soon.
Ben closes his eyes, lets his head fall back against the lip of the tub. “Now I kind of wish you’d found a way out of the house. Could have gotten some cool air in.”
“I wish I had, too, but if there’s a way out, I couldn’t find it.” The bed dips as Dean sits on the edge and gazes out the window. From this angle, Ben can only see the side of his face, and the window isn’t showing his reflection. “I wish I could figure this out.”
“Figure what out?” Ben shivers and huddles down under his favorite Power Ranger comforter, destroyed when he was eight by the changelings smearing red clay all over it when they dragged him out of bed. His temperature is down to one-oh-four, which is good, though that heavy sluggish feeling still lingers.
“This.” Dean gestures broadly at the room around him, his bedroom in Cicero, with the walls painted dark blue and the glowing stick-on-stars on the ceiling. “Why I’m here.”
Ben hunches his shoulders and rolls over, not willing to let Dean see the hot tears tracking down his cheeks. “Why are you so eager to leave? What did I do that was so wrong? I thought you loved us.”
“Oh, Ben,” Dean says, sadly. “Why won’t you come to me?”
“But I did come to you, Dean. You’re the one who wants to leave,” he mutters into the pillow.
Dean’s hand on his head, brushing back his hair gently like Mom would. He’s mad at Dean, should pull away on principle, but it seems like so much effort and it really does feel nice.
“I don’t, Ben.” Dean’s voice is thick and raspy, like it used to get whenever Sam came up, before Dean knew he was alive. “I never did. But I’m right here, now. I’m not going anywhere.”
Maybe it’s the exhaustion. Maybe it’s the fever that’s down to one-oh-two and holding steady. Maybe it’s his hope that this time, Dean really will stay. But whatever it is, he believes Dean enough to let himself go to sleep once more.
Hermes is holding out one hand expectantly. “Fifteen sixty-three.”
Ben frowns at the empty hand, confused. “What?”
They are standing in front of the gated entrance of a rich subdivision - huge houses and tall gates and a high, uninviting wall. Royal Palms Plantations is scrawled across the median wall in fancy white letters, and Ben bets his mom will never make enough money for them to live in a gated community like this.
“I can’t buy my own sacrifices.” Hermes wiggles his fingers. “You have to pay me back for this to work. Fifteen dollars and sixty three cents.”
Ben digs into his pocket and pulls out the last of his money. Exactly fifteen dollars and sixty three cents; turns out bus tickets are expensive. His stomach plummets. This has to be some kind of joke, and he remembers that Hermes is the god of tricksters. “Is this some kind of trick?”
“I can see where you might think that, but I am the god of thieves. If I wanted money, I wouldn’t have gone through such an elaborate set up and wasted my energy on a vampire to steal fifteen dollars from a runaway.” He wiggles his fingers again. “Come on, fork it over.”
“M’not a runaway,” Ben mutters. If he weren’t already doubting the wisdom of taking help from a Greek god who apparently hangs around bus stations beheading vampires, he is now.
Hermes shifts impatiently, his annoyance coming through. “Don’t worry. I’m a god, remember? I’ll make sure you are fed and get to where you need to go.”
When Ben continues to stare at him doubtfully, Hermes sighs. “Think of it as a show of faith. It’ll add more kick.”
Against his better judgment, Ben hands him the last of his money. Hermes winks at him, an unsettling gleam in his eye, and hands him the grocery bag. Ben takes a quick look to see what he is going to be sacrificing to Hermes: a bottle of wine with a screw on cap, a bear-shaped bottle of honey, and a can of meat.
Ben wrinkles his nose in disgust. “Deviled ham?”
Hermes shrugs, a sheepish smile curving his lips. “What can I say? It’s a guilty pleasure. Shall we?”
Hermes waves his hand at the key pad and the gate rumbles open.
“We’re making the sacrifice here?”
“No. You are making the sacrifice here.” He strolls through the gate, hands in pocket. “You need a boundary marker for this to work. Gated community, piles of stones to demark the boundary, in this case in the form of its wall, and inscribed by a tree sacred to me. Trust me, this is just screaming altar. I’ve been eyeing it for months.”
Uneasily, Ben follows him through, the rumble of the gates closing behind them probably less ominous than it seems.
“This way, young sir,” Hermes says and disappears into a narrow passage between the stone wall and the line of tall, manicured hedges next to it.
Ben hesitates at the curb. The neighborhood houses loom over him, their windows dark. SUVs and BMWs sit silent in driveways. The oak trees sway and whisper in the chilly breeze. Somewhere in the distance, he can hear the ch-ch-ch of sprinklers and the barking of large dogs.
Hermes pokes his out of the bushes. “Are you coming or not, young sir?”
Ben should turn around right now and walk away. He should just go and not look back, should probably even do it at a run.
Instead he nods and follows him in.
The passage is narrow, giving Ben just enough room to walk straight ahead without scraping his shoulders on the wall or the bushes, but only that. It’s dark as well; Hermes is a person shaped shadow ahead of him, so silent that Ben wouldn’t have known he was there if he weren’t able to see him. Eventually he stops where the passage has opened up into a hollow, a little wider than the passage and partially illuminated by the back porch light of the closest house and a street light on the other side of the wall. It’s just large enough for both of them to stand together.
“Now,” Hermes says, kicking aside leaves and branches and random bits of dead flora to clear a spot on the ground against the wall. “Remove the ham from the can and pour the honey over it.”
Ben grimaces at how weird that is for a sacrifice and gets to work, pulling the pull tab back until the top of the can peels back. The ham is a disgusting dark blob that comes out of the can with a gross sucking noise and plops on the ground with a wet splat. The honey is thick and viscous and takes its sweet time rolling out of the plastic bear. The combination smells awful, pungent and a little spicy. He never thought honey and ham together could be so gross.
“That okay?” he asks when he’s done.
The weak light gleams on the wet mess of canned ham and honey as Hermes leans in to inspect it with a critical eye. Ben shifts impatiently, waiting for the verdict.
“Perfect, young sir,” Hermes says after what seems like forever. “You’ve done very well. Now you need to pray.”
“Pray?” Ben isn’t sure that he believes that much. “To you?”
“Yes. A simple prayer will do. Something like: I invoke Hermes Hodios, patron of travelers. Guide my steps on your roads, protect me from misfortune, and guard me from weariness. Hail, Hermes, giver of grace, guide, and giver of good things.’ Then you will pour the wine over the ham and honey.”
Ben stares at him, dumbfounded. “Um, I don’t think I can remember all of that.”
Hermes nods. “I thought as much. No matter. I’ll help you. Just make sure you mean it. You really have to believe that I will help you.”
Ben nods, and uses the few seconds it takes to unscrew the cap of the wine bottle to get his head in the right place. I believe, he thinks hard as he can, remembering what he had seen in the bus station bathroom, the winged cap and sandals, the twin snakes, twisting on his staff. This is a god standing next to him; he must be able to help him.
I believe, he thinks, and slowly begins to recite the invocation, looking to Hermes for confirmation. “I invoke Hermes Hodios?”
Hermes nods, gesturing at him to go on.
“I invoke Hermes Hoidos, patron god of travelers...”
Ben goes slowly, carefully reciting as Hermes helps him along, offering him a word here and there to keep him going. At the end he looks up to Hermes for confirmation. “That okay?”
“Perfect. Now come on.” He gestures impatiently. “Pour the wine.”
I believe, he thinks again and raises the wine bottle. The sour, acrid smell of alcohol drifts up from the honey covered ham as the wine glugs-glugs-glugs its way out of the bottle.
Next to him, Hermes stumbles sideways, catching himself on the wall with one hand.
“Are you okay?” Ben wonders if he messed up the sacrifice; that would be an awful waste of his last fifteen dollars and sixty three cents.
Hermes nods, sort of sloppy, like his friend Derek had the time he came to school drugged up on codeine after having a tooth pulled.
“Very much so, yes. More than okay. Perfect, actually.” Hermes falls against the wall, lets it take his weight at his shoulder. Ben can see the slash of a drunken grin in the porch light. “Good job, young sir. You gave me exactly the right amount of belief. I feel like I can take on Zeus himself.”
Ben shifts uneasily. “Um, okay. Good.”
Hermes leans his head back against the wall, his eyes now a gleaming gold color under drooping eyelids. He gazes at Ben, and Ben hunches his shoulders, uncomfortable with the scrutiny.
“Tell me, young sir,” Hermes says at last, “have you been dreaming of the future?”
Ben tenses. “How did you know that?”
“I’m a god, remember? I can see into your soul. And you’ve carrying around the gift of prophecy for a while now. I do wonder how it got there.”
“I don’t know. I just started dreaming.” Ben purposely leaves out remembering Dean just before. He may hate Dean now, but he doesn’t want to draw any attention to him. From what he had gathered, he and Sam weren’t much liked by supernatural beings.
“Hmm. Interesting. Have you tried to use it at all? Have you asked it for help or to show you how to get where you’re going?”
Ben shakes his head. “I didn’t know I could do that.”
“Oh yes, young sir. It’s the nature of your particular gift. A question asked must be answered. Try it. It’s weak right now, like an atrophied muscle. But put it to use, practice with it, and it should plump right up.” Hermes’ sloppy grin sharpens, and Ben finds himself hunching his shoulders again. “You’ll be reeking with power in no time.”
Ben suddenly wanted to be gone, away from this god and the sacrifice on the ground and his sloppy, drunken smile.
“Is that all I have to do?” Ben hazards a look back the way they came. Hermes is in the way, but there’s enough room that he can slip past him, easy. It just depends on whether Hermes is ready to let him go or not.
“Yes. And it will work for all the things you need - food, lodging, rides.” Hermes follows Ben’s line of sight. “But there are miles to go before you sleep, yes?”
“I guess.”
“Go, then, young sir. I won’t stop you. You’ve given me all I need.”
“Uh. Thanks.” Ben says, edging past him. “For the help, and uh, everything.”
“Oh, believe me, young sir,” Hermes says, licking his lips like a cat finishing off its prey. “It was all my pleasure.”
Ben gets past him and bolts back down the narrow passage, his backpack bouncing hard in the small of his back.
“Enjoy the gift of prophecy!” Hermes calls out behind him, and laughs.
Ben can’t get out of there fast enough.
An hour later, he hauls himself up into the bright colored climbing tubes he has been seeing in his dreams for weeks now. He had nearly cried when he saw them, somehow knowing they were a safe haven for the night, a place to escape. They’re just big enough for him to fit inside on his hands and knees. It’s a tight squeeze, but that means he’s probably pretty safe from any adult sized monsters, human or not. He gets settled under the fleece he took from Aunt Sarah’s and stares up into the darkness, his body more than pleased to be stretched out and still.
He’s freezing and exhausted. He’s broke and terrified. His head is still throbbing from the hit he took when the vampire slapped him down. Dean erased his memories, his mom is missing, and he might have killed Bill with an exorcism. He has been attacked by a demon and a vampire and possibly swindled by a Greek god.
At this point, it doesn’t seem like he has much to lose.
“Okay,” he says, his voice echoing back at him strangely within the tube. “Weird future dreams, where can I find Dean?”
Ben waits for something to happen, holding his breath. Unsurprisingly, nothing does.
Miserable, he curls up on his side and hides his face in the blanket, fights back tears of despair because he’s just not going to cry like a little kid. He’s not. The demons and the monsters and Dean don’t get to have his tears.
Eventually, he drifts off despite the cold, and dreams of the usual things: the wings, the book, Dean’s startled, guilty expression, and the gold paint spilling over his hands. They roll on and on as usual, but now there are new dreams in between: a crucifix swinging from a rear view mirror and the strong scent of old lady perfume, a hot blonde, handing out sandwiches, a couple dreadlocked hippies grinning at him from the opened door of a VW bus, a ten dollar bill, caught in a gutter, and finally, Dean standing next to gas pumps as he fills the Impala, the wind from an approaching storm whipping at his clothes, and his voice calling out to him across the distance: “Ben, come here.”
And in the dream, he goes.
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